THE X-FILES Gillian (pronounced jill'-ee-an) Anderson first gained
recognition as an actress for her off-Broadway
performance in Alan Ayckbourne's "Absent Friends" at the
Manhattan Theater Club, for which she won a Theatre World
Award. Her love of theater began in high school where she
participated in community theater. In college, Anderson
studied with the National Theater of Great Britain at
Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and then at the
Goodman Theater School at Chicago's DePaul University,
where she obtained her BFA degree.
Anderson, 5' 2" tall, was born August 9, 1968 and
lives in Los Angeles. She is married to former X Files
art director Clyde Klotz, and gave birth to a daughter,
Piper, on Sept. 25, 1994.
As a teenager, Gillian Anderson kept busy by shocking her middle-American hometown with her outrageous dress and spiked hair of varying colors. Like many angry young girls of the eighties, she could best be described as a cross between Madonna and Cyndi Lauper; Anderson swore at pedestrians who looked at her funny and sported the occasional safety pin through her cheek.Anderson was raised in London from the age of two, but her family decided to move back to the States just as she was entering those formative teen years. They landed in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where her English accent immediately made her the subject of ridicule. Either out of anger at the move or just general teenage angst, Anderson rebelled. At the age of fourteen, she hooked up with a twenty-one-year-old Sid Vicious wanna-be, winning his loyalty by buying him "Big Gulps and cigarettes" and sometimes singing back-up in his punk band wearing nothing but bandages. The rebellion spilled over to high school, where she was a notorious hellcat; she was even arrested while trying to glue the school's doors shut just days before her graduation. Anderson got a hint of her fame to come in her high school's hall of fame when she was voted Class Clown, Most Bizarre Girl, and Most Likely To Go Bald. But even before the glue dried, Anderson had begun a transformation. She had found an outlet for her frustration in community theatre--an interest that she continued to pursue at the Goodman Theater School of Drama at DePaul University in Chicago. After earning a degree in fine arts, Anderson moved to the Big Apple, where she worked in off-Broadway plays and, like all other actresses, supported herself as a waitress. Her first real break came when she replaced Mary-Louise Parker in the play Absent Friends. That role led to a low-budget feature called The Turning, and another stage role in The Philanthropist. Anderson decided to try her luck in Los Angeles, but there was one problem: she was a television snob and refused for quite a while to go on pilot auditions.
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